Overstating the case
Sir: Peter Ackroyd (28 August) is entitled to his opinion of the film Puberty Blues (though he seems wilfully to miss the point of the film) but he is not entitled to jump from his opinion to a sweeping condemna- tion of all Australian films, let alone all Australian culture. The film is clearly nothing else than an unromanticised, fairly faithful, depiction of a small group of unat- tractive teenagers in one small part of Australia, yet he feels justified both in believing that these teenagers are represen- tative of all Australian teenagers and their relationships, and in stating that the film maker should not have depicted them ac- curately! If an accurate film were made about skinheads and shown in Australia, would Australians be entitled to generalise from it to all English culture? And how realistic and representative of life in Scotland is Gregory's Girl? How much representative weight should any piece of cultural production be deemed to carry?
I find Mr Ackroyd's tirade against Australia incredible and am left wondering what motivates such an unbalanced, in- sulting, and overgeneralising attack, which ignores the multiple realities of what is go- ing on. If Australia is such a vacant culture, why does it have the highest book purchases per capita in the world? And why does Sydney have more active theatres than any other Anglophone city apart from London and New York (which of course both have potential audiences at least five times as large)? These are much more interesting facts than the one he has managed to pick up so far. Did he not see the recent BBC season of Australian films? To my mind they often dealt with personal relations in a far more meaningful way than much of what does the rounds in British cinemas these days, as Richard West pointed out at the time.
I doubt if a piece of such derogatory journalism could be published about any other country, or in any other country. Australia is no total paradise (but where is?) as its film-makers and writers, to their credit, have been concerned to highlight; but neither is it a desert. Criticism of a generalising socio-cultural kind surely re- quires some attempt to draw distinctions and analyse components and trends. It may have been tolerated once that the British press treated Australia in an ignorant, pre- judiced, and contemptuous manner but it should no longer be permitted. If you want to grasp the many-faceted reality of
Australia, Mr Ackroyd, do some research. It's a small, democratic country and many Australians are open to constructive criticism.
C. Lloyd
Wolfson College Oxford
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